The Ethereum vs. Solana Debate | Justin Drake vs. Anatoly Yakovenko

there is a reason why ethereum data availability is worth more than Solana's data availability because Network effects yes this notion of shared security this notion of synchronous composability of because of the economic security not just that but also access to tvl access to Applications there's only one ens in the world right there's only one ethereum and internet this is really weak this is this is why I think it's ugly and it's not fixable is it's not not a

fundamentally hard thing welcome to banglas where today we're exploring the frontier of ethereum versus salana in debate style format this is Ryan Sean Adams I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless so on the debate track today ethereum versus salana we've got a conversation between ethereum researcher Justin Drake and co-founder of salana anatol yak Eno now both of

these were previous bankless guests I'm sure you know them from their respective communities The Prompt for this episode was really simple give us The Good the Bad and the Ugly of each other's respective blockchain ecosystems take the conversation wherever you want you can talk about architecture you could talk about uh Economic Security and indeed the guests did David and I tried to give both guests time to debate each other with minimal intervention and I think at times this went well at other times it probably caused us to go down into to semantic rabbit holes fairly

deeply but overall I think both guests were able to communicate their their main messages throughout this episode sometimes they were attacking sometimes they were defending occasionally they were throwing each other compliments it's a very entertaining episode overall if you pay attention to Anatoli and Drake on Twitter you'll know of a couple topics that are coming your way is economic security a meme is issuance a cost uh some big dividing lines finally get sused out in long form on this episode um how did this episode come to be it was actually kind of spawned out

of just a simple ping from a member of the Bist Discord asking if it would be possible to get Justin and anatol on podcast together to have a debate and I was like hm I also want this uh and since it didn't really hurt to ask upon asking both drus and N FL said yeah sure and so after a bit of scheduling here we are uh I think the one thing I'll say about this episode and generally like crypto at large when people enter crypto they generally find a tribe pretty quickly like you come into crypto you learn about it and then you learn about a layer one that you like identify with more than others because it aligns with

your Vibe the how and why people become members of the tribe is like personally I think one of the more interesting things to explore in crypto uh and you can really see it come out in this debate uh you can really see some of the dividing lines between just uh who Justin is and what ethereum is and who Anatolia is and what salana is uh so that's kind of like the frame of frame of mind that I encourage listeners to go into this episode with uh as they hear addressing and anatol pars out some of these things uh finally in in a long

form conversation so let's go ahead and get to that long form conversation but first moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors bankless Nation we are extremely excited to tee up this conversation with two esteemed guests we have anat yakovenko he's the creator of salana he's the co-founder of salana labs he is Mr consensus at the speed of light and toi welcome to bankless love that intro thank you for having me and in the other corner I don't know if I should do fighting meme for this but uh Justin Drake he is a researcher at the ethereum foundation he

is Mr ultrasound money Justin welcome to bankless thanks for having me as well guys this is going to be a conversation uh between some of the design decisions uh and differences between salana and ethereum I think this is a conversation that um the the entire crypto Community will tune in for and it's great to have you both I think the way we're going to organize this is in a few se sections so the good the bad the ugly uh first we're going to talk about the good then we're going to talk about maybe the bad the things that are um correctable over time

and then we're going to talk about the ugly and of course we can Veer from one section to the other as uh as you guys uh see fit but let's start the conversation with something hopeful something optimistic the good side of things I want to start the question with with you Justin so uh let's talk about the good what is good about salana from your perspective so if I were to think of sorry I was just unmuting I had to unmute I was M

sure so if I were to have a metaphor in mind I'm thinking of the the good as a bucket with bows in it uh and actually think of the good bucket as being the one with the most bowls so the largest one with the most volume and Solana has lots of you know obvious good balls in its in its bucket it has very high fruit put uh very low fees very good ux low latency it has good traction millions of users it has good adoption good financial performance actually that that

has been amazing right we've seen Solana raised to basically position number three so if you go to coin Gecko and sort by fully diluted valuation Solana is the the number three layer one um and I'm tempted to uh change the the quote by Michael sailor and say um that there is no fourth best um if you look at if you look at uh fully diluted valuations there's like there's a ripple there's B BNB there's ton but like they

don't really compete in my opinion with Solana so it really is those three players uh in in the layer one space and I think what Solana is doing for etherium is that is providing healthy competition it's a sort of accelerationism and not only accelerationism partly because of good execution but also because of contrarianism like the way that I think of Anatolia as is this constantly contrarian person like his brain is wired in a very unusual way and I say

this in in in in the best of ways possible my wife loves this this is this is her favorite feature about me and I think you guys uh you know bring forward like interesting insights uh and you have you know good Vision so for example I think that um you know you want to build this idea of a global State machine what does it mean Global it means that a single L1 can support the whole world like in my mind um we're going to see l1s that can support 10

million transactions per second which is enough for the whole world it's 10 transa 100 100 transactions per second uh per human per day and then the other big idea that um son brings to the table is this this idea of synchronicity that not only is like high scalability but also different parts of the states can call each other synchronously at least if you're willing to pay for it um I also think that Solana has like very good pace and reactivity there's been all sorts of issues in the past uh that

we're going to talk about in the bad section but broadly speaking it just keeps on chugging along and and and and and moving along and in terms of the the insights I think like there are real insights that you know anator you bring to the table for example the fact that we live in this exponential world with neilson's law right the fundamental um bottleneck for scaling uh blockchains is bandwidth and we are in this very luxurious position where uh bandwidth keeps on on on scaling um exponentially

so overall this is a massive bucket of of good for Soler and toally uh your turn to talk about ethereum what is in the good bucket for ethereum I mean tons of stuff like I think what I envy out of ethereum is it has a the main net has a very large distributed Network across a very large number of physical end nodes and very large number of actual internet links so when you look at it as a whole and you think of like what are these Network supposed to do the mission that

ethereum has it's supposed to provide security guarantees that are stronger than an honest majority so if you kind of if you if you end up with like accepting honest majority guarantees which is fine for a lot of use cases is it's a multisig at the end of the day I think you just can't really scale it to support the world in a trustless way just nobody like you can't have Banks and 401ks and like human Finance trust some honest majority that could go that could blow up at any moment nobody wants

that so you need better than that and I think ethereum has been so hyperfocused on this that like when they started working on sharding they pivoted away from that because there's no way to do it which is awesome like they it's actually like the coolest thing to see somebody be like you know what this is not going to work because of the security properties we care so much about we're going to work on this other road map first because that one doesn't compromise something really really important um and the execution for

people like think ethereum is moving slow but if you look at the size of the network its value um I would be terrified of any changes to if it was at that value it's just it's just terrifying right for something to go wrong outages at that point are much more catastrophic I think um so ethereum actually moves pretty fast for projected size the four clients is awesome I think this is again the biggest thing that you're supposed to provide is this

better than honest majority security guarantees and when you have four clients you're not trusting a single piece of software even with the best of human intentions it's still written by humans right like the original bft paper actually talks about you need to write you need to have separate teams building stuff in isolation so you can actually have this fa tolerance across the human buz factor um so there's a lot of Envy there and I think that's awesome like from my perspective ethereum is at a point where to cause a double spend

attack you need NATO to coordinate across the thousands of different isbs and to have everyone execute the like a thing all at once and that's basically like great I don't think you can do better than that in the real world um so it's it's at a point which I think every other L1 should be envious of and trying to get there as fast as they can right as fast as they reasonably can all of that I think it is puts it in a class I think in my mind actually above Bitcoin

so for for what that's worth we're starting this off on a a very nice foot then both both of you said uh nice things about the the other's primary ecosystem an toally just curious your Reflections on what Justin said about salana do do do you agree with his characterization like um yeah what was what was going through your mind as Justin was saying these things sure I mean like I think I find those those to be positives of what salana has accomplished I think probably because of my experience working at Balcom for like

a decade I saw how fast neel's law moves and how fast Mo's law moves when it's targeting an industry that's in hyper growth and you just kind of your brain as an engineer shifts you're not writing for code for Hardware today or or yesterday even you're writing for Hardware that's going to be out in two to four years so you're expecting just everything to get faster um so this is something that I think has been something that I've been like kind of hitting the table with to all the

engineers that are working on salana you got to build things to scale as if the hardware is twice as fast just assume it's going to be twice as fast uh how you're writing the code how you're designing The Sims and and kind of Leverage that um and I think that Focus has paid off honestly like that was a big bet that a small team like a very small team that was had way less funding than all our all our competitors took from 2018 to 2020 to launch and we

launch faster because we like don't make this complicated just throw a threadpool there it's that it takes work right it takes engineering but it's much easier to think of problems like okay like even look at proof of History it's not I remember talking to Justin like a week after we like became an official company about vdfs and our solution was this very very extremely dumb approach just verify the vdf with as many cores as you

have available to and don't worry about these this fancy math that I don't understand if it's secure or not and that worked so like stuff like this I think is underappreciated and I'm glad that uh you know Justin has has recognized that in some ways so Justin anoia has said some nice things about ethereum said it would take NATO to um disrupt the network and cause it a double spend uh and like maybe they couldn't even do it said it's um you know like uh more I I

forget get the phraseology anat But like on a higher pedestal than Bitcoin Le let's just say so uh what was going through your head is anat was um extolling the the virtues and and the values of ethereum there yeah so one thing that anaton said which I agree with is that we it's kind of bad designed nowadays to try and rely on honest majority and it is true that our previous Shing design did rely on honest ma majority but this is something that we have moved away from just through technological innovation so now there's

this idea of data availability sampling where you don't have an honest majority you have an honest minority and we have this new flavor of Shing which is dank Shing and not only have we removed the honest majority assumption but we've also added synchrony so it used to be that we had 1,24 or 64 asynchronous shots U that would each have its own independent proposer and instead now we have kind of this one big proposer that that basically publishes is a big block that everyone is capable of verifying is

is indeed available using very very low bandwidth uh and this technique is called Data ability sampling um and uh I think Anatoli had a podcast called No Shing um and you know eventually decided to change the name and I think this is good because the fundamentals are really in favor of Shing or at least dank Shing in terms of uh other things that he said is one is that it's very very difficult for to double spend um uh ethereum now while I agree with that statement I

think this is kind of a the wrong lens uh and the reason is that there is a much easier attack than double spend which is basically around censorship and and liveness uh so anat toi focuses a lot in my opinion on safety and to a very very large extent I agree that safety is not an issue one because the validity of blocks can be checked by full node so if you try and just creat an invalid chain it will just get rejected and for specifically reorgs and double spend there's this notion of of

of slashing is just so expensive to do the attack that it's basically uh impossible but there is like these these more subtle attacks uh around liveness and cens resistance which I think are the ones that are most important and I think are ones that anatol is is under indexing upon and maybe we can talk about this later and another thing that Anatoli said is simd and maybe the The Listener might not know what that means so I just wanted to highlight it's it's the equivalent of an EIP for Solana it means salana Improvement document

beautiful uh as we kind of wrap up the this good section I want to give also a chance for each of you guys to maybe Elevate something that is unsung about your own ecosystem so anally talked about what's good about ethereum Justin talked about what's good about salana all of a sudden this is really feeling like therapy but we'll ignore that uh there's something wrong with therapy David mean for this to feel to feel like a therapy session but nonetheless here here we are but maybe Justin maybe you can advocate for ethereum what's something unsung about ethereum that you think is definitely in the good category

that is worth elevating and of course we'll go to Anatolia afterwards right so one of my mental models is that um the layer one space is Winer take most and so we need to ask ourselves who is going to be that winner like what are the the shelling points um what are the structural advantages and in my opinion eum has won uh in the sense that it is the place with the most Network effects with the most liquidity it is the one that is the most mature the most secure um and so you know that is maybe like

the best compliment that you can give to AUM is that it's it's it's pre-ordained in some sense as as Anon mentioned to to flip you know Bitcoin and become number one and you know this meme where um there's this guy who says it's not just about winning but everyone else needs to lose well it's a little bit like that just because of market dynamics like I really do see a world where at the layer one level the network effects are so strong that it makes it extremely difficult to be an alternative layer one

and I think this is one of the the struggles that that Solana will have going forward and a toally feel free to reflect upon that and then also uh just Elevate something that you think that is unsung about salana that deserves more praise yeah I guess from my perspective I kind of treat these systems as backend systems and developers are expect to kind of learn and switch every two to five years like it's just part of life so I don't it's really really hard to have a Moe and you see that with languages and databases and stuff like that even the

Oracle is still around but makes most of its money through licensing uh and people use Rus and sqlite and as Hardware improves sqla becomes you know easier and easier to deploy for the kind of use cases that you would need like Oracle my sequel before um so you kind of have like a lot of tension and competition in the back end even though being first mover is an awesome Advantage I think what's unsung about salana um probably that I think

why we're succeeding in a lot of ways is because the developers are not infrastructure focused for the most part they're focused on apps so if you look at trying to get users you need to give something to use right like that's that's fundamentally you need to provide value to a user and if you look at Solana investment dollars are smaller than ethereum's but vast majority of them are going to products that are user targeting you can actually I don't know if this is true or not I haven't done

the numbers but my guess is that actual product investment to and salon and ethereum might even be compatible um so what's unsung is that how well the salon devs are executing and actually user capture building products and and stuff like that more so than you know people talk about ethereum having network effects I think most of those around in the infra side which is just a piece that's not necessary if you have a high performance lowc cost chain so

there I mean while I would agree with the statement that ethereum culture to a very large extent focuses on on infrastructure uh historically I think there is a shift now so we have l2s like base arbitrum optimism where you just come in as a Dev and you just don't have to think about infrastructure it just scales magically it just works um you don't have to worry about uh about scaling about you know fast confirmations and and things like that

and it and you know the the metrics speaks for themselves actually with no trade-offs right so there are trade-offs but they're being taken and in some sense what teams are doing is that they're they're making even more tradeoffs than Solana and being willing to to kind of play the even longer game right in some sense Solana is like fake it until you make it um so it comes in with like lots and lots of technical debt and then is using that as a strategy for user

acquisition and then you know as as there's a new fire that comes in you kind of have to fix your technical Deb and in some sense what the L2 is all about is playing this game even harder so you know you have chains like bass and optimism uh that don't even have a fraud proof right that's the game that they're willing to play uh they're willing to fake it until they make it they have a totally centralized sequence there but the good news the fundamentals is that if you're willing to project ahead there are ways to decentralize all

of this things all of these things so a lot of my personal research in the last you know 6 to 12 months has been around for example decentralized pre-confirmation how can we have the 100 millisecond user experience that arbitr and base provide but in a decentralized fashion and it turns out it's not that difficult um and not only that in some sense it it destroys the user experience of Solana because Solana has 400 millisecond block times about 5% of the blocks are skipped on the other hand with with a

decentralized pre-confirmation uh mechanism that I suggest you have 100 millisecond pre-confirmation so it's it's really um we can have the best of both wild we can have you know the speed of Lights pre- confirmations and the decentralization I I think we have moved into the bad section uh squarely feels out of the the good section here may maybe to to just set up the bad section Again The Good the Bad the Ugly we've moved into we've moved into the bad uh bad I'll like characterize as

like temporal uh the current problem Set uh whereas the ugly are things that are just like completely untenable unrecoverable like Final in nature but the bad is just like the current the current problem set of respective ecosystems uh and so we we've now drifted into the bad uh Justin opened up the the good section so anat maybe we can throw this one to you just the bad about ethereum we've kind of like touched on it a little bit Justin just touched on it uh in uh with talking about transaction finality just now uh

how would you characterize the current problem set the bad side of ethereum right now I mean like evm is really like designed by uh academics it's just a VM that like no one with VM experience would have ever built so it has a lot of technical do like design dot it's fixable but it's like a Blood Sweat and Tears to to do that and I think you're going to see very slow progress there um and a lot like the because it's so Central it kind of

permeates to everything like there's stuff that I feel like like the the expensive L1 and the split between l2s is kind of breaking a lot of the financial Dynamics and splitting liquidity which diminishes the value of ethereum as an L1 uh you know two years ago so if you're now as an alternative L1 like salana you're not really competing with the ethereum ecosystem a developer has to make a a decision do I deploy on Ethel one e L2 or where do I

put my focus right I can't focus on all of these different environments at the same time it's it it is difficult right and that means that salana now being one aggregate layer might be an easier and simpler choice for a lot of devs so in a lot of ways that's may be fixable but I don't know that that's a hard one and because of the split in terms of you're going to have different confirmation semantics different levels of fraud proofs different levels of security people people will take those decision like those factors into account and they

won't all decide to go in one place so it's going to be very hard to have like one single dominant winner um but it's possible there'll be power law distribution there are you kind of characterizing that as just like developmental friction it's just like kind of deving through quicksand exactly but the quicksand is never ending like it's just going to get worse like this is like I think kind of this like it's both a strength but it's it's a weakness

right you have a chronopia of options and too many options create developer friction and prevent and create user friction at the top I think maybe there's decisions that the old one can do on its own but these are this is governance and that's that's above my pay grade um this is interesting and it tell because it feels like you're you're talking about the bad but you're also um bringing in some of the ugly too right and in indicating that some of these uh things might be unresolvable would you say that's true or I think they're hard

to resolve they're hard to resolve these are hard problems because they require a lot of coordination and potentially sacrificing but the proof of work to proof of stakes which sacrificed right the P miners uh so it's possible Right to like it's possible to fix these but it's hard Justin back to you right so one of the things that an toally ask is as a Dev should I launch on L1 or L2 well I'll answer that for you you should launch on L2 there is no future for the L1 uh directly the L1 is a settlement

layer now a fair question is which L2 and the reason why it's a fair question today is because the l2s are like silos there's fragmentation on ethereum um but my vision is that we can fix fragmentation and there's a whole bankless episode on that whereby the silos basically mailed together it's almost like what we're left with is the boundaries between a smart contract You could argue for example that a and uniswap being separate smart contracts

are in some sense siloed but really you benefit from synchronous composability so synchronous composability is the the strongest form of melding uh and removal of of the of of the Frontiers now it is true that it's going to take significant amount of engineering to get to this magical land of synchronous composability and there's two pillars that were discussed in the episode one is shared sequencing that is actually fairly trivial technically it's mostly a coordination thing where we all need as

a as an ecosystem to choose a sequencer that we will use as D shared sequencer that can give us synchronous composability and I have a specific thesis here which is that the based sequencer meaning the L1 sequencer the ethereum sequencer itself is the primary candidate to be that shared sequencer and then there's this other like highly technical thing which is real time proving and by that I mean real time SN proving we need to be able to make a transaction and a few milliseconds later

have a SN proof proving that this transaction is valid and so now the various l2s don't need to trust each other and so now you can send Assets in and out of of l2s essentially immediately and they act like contracts at layer one where there's no longer this this this boundar so yes today as an as a as a Dev you do have to make a bet you know for the short and medium term but eventually ethereum will will fix its fragmentation and will be one uh

massive virtual machine now one of the things that you said is that the evm you know is for example hard to parallelize um and you know there's just some cap in terms of TPS just one of its problems like 32 by register storage values there's like a whole bunch of like things that are like really fugly about it from a VM design perspective right that's fair um but you know like these 32-bit registers what do they ultimately impact is performance so

like any single instance of the evm will have some cap on how many transactions per second they can process let's say that this cap is you know X well what we can do is just have multiple instances of the evm right we can have a thousand instances and now with synchronous composability if you're willing to pay for this uh then you basically have the ability to spread your state across multiple instances of these EVMS and still have them act like one super evm

now another thing worth mentioning is that we don't have to use the evm the the beauty of rollups is choose your virtual machine and if it turns out that svm is like the best and greatest uh virtu machine for the rest of humanity well guess what what we're going to see is we're going to we're going to see svm rollups and um there's actually teams building exactly that uh one actually one of the best teams on Solana has migrated away from Solana and is now building an an L2 they're building a a

rollup on ethereum putting the uh the the svm there uh and they intentially decided to really buy into this this feis that the L1 is when it take most and and Solana's probably not going to make it as an L1 and so really the next best thing that they can do is launch as a rollup on ethereum and be the a dominant execution chain on top of the I think you're a little bit mistaking Mist misstating their intentions they're going to run a a product on salana and

one on ethereum I don't think they're going to migrate away go ahead sorry I didn't I didn't mean to interrupt you but like you're you're kind of over this is the end of of my rent like you don't have to use the evm if you don't if it turns out svm is the answer a will use the svm so the the core benefit of what salana does is global synchronization and when you move stuff into l2s and pre-confirmation you're effectively running a centralized

exchange like it's trustless and you can verify it but you have a single spot whether you're trading in New York or Singapore where stuff happens and that's fine but that's not a single giant Global State machine like the whole point of salana is to synchronize data around the world the fact that it's high throughput the fact that it's in parallel and all this other stuff these are secondary effects and why data synchronization is really really important is because if an event happens in Singapore that newswire has to go